by Aer-ki Jyr
“I have trusted them for so long that I never feared them. Now…I cannot tolerate being outside their good graces. I feel vulnerable in a way I never have before.”
“You will recover your balance in time, and for you I think its best if you get assigned a mission immediately and work through these things on the side.”
“A mission for you?”
“Partially, but also for you. If the Zak’de’ron mount a massive assault against Star Force using their servant races, many of whom I suspect we know nothing about, and those servant races are sacrificed merely to do us enough damage to set up the final assault from the Zak’de’ron fleets, the Voku may be destroyed. Do you want to walk away from them in exile and let the Zak’de’ron send them to their deaths…or do you want to find a way to save them?”
“Save them? I’ve been exiled. I have no command authority left.”
“Do you know what they told the others about your absence?”
“I do not.”
“What do you suspect they will say?”
“That I have been exiled.”
Paul shook his head. “I think not. That would undermine their authority if someone such as you was rewarded for millennia of faithful service with exile. Think. What could they lie about that would allow a smooth transition?”
Cal-com was silent for a long time, as if the thought of the Elders lying was something he had never considered before, but eventually he came to the same conclusion that Paul had.
“That I was recruited with the other volunteers. No one is told where they go or what they do, and none return, so my absence would not be questioned.”
“So the first thing we do is find out if that’s true. We have enough trade assets that we can get information about such a public announce without having to actually poke around. Assuming that’s true, and the Voku later found out what really happened to you, how would your race react?”
“They would be confused. They might think that Star Force also worked for the Elders and that was where they had assigned me, which is accurate.”
“No,” Paul said firmly. “They did not assign you here. They threw you out onto my doorstep and don’t care if I send you away or kill you. You are dead to them now and they expect you to exist in a long, painful, broken mess that will eventually expire. This was not a reassignment. It was a clever form of execution. See for yourself.”
Paul telepathically showed Cal-com the hidden message in his own mind meant for Paul, essentially mocking the Archon and hinting of the conflict to come while referring to Cal-com as nothing more than a pawn…one that Paul valued and had tainted, thus he was being discarded.
Cal-com’s mind immediately tried to twist it into something respectable, but with Paul’s thoughts interpreting the message he couldn’t. He saw it through Paul’s eyes, and for the first time got a glimpse of who the Zak’de’ron truly were.
Cal-com began to breathe heavily, then he slipped out of his too small chair and dropped to a knee on the floor, his hands sinking into the carpet as he stared at nothing.
“I have been blind, Paul. I do not know how I could be so blind.”
“Take it slow,” the Human said, remaining sitting the foot of the bed a couple meters away. “When I first learned the truth of the V’kit’no’sat it took several days to work through it. Everything I had been taught previously had been a lie, and since I had grown up within that lie I had not thought beyond it. My mind had been shaped into a wedge, and when I had to open it up into a sphere it was not a pleasant experience. What you are going through is far worse, but you will get through it. I promise you will, but right now you need to embrace the pain, the disgust, and the fear…let it soak into you, for with it comes the freedom of truth, and that is worth the effort a thousand times over. But you have to take it slow or you can get overwhelmed.”
“Thank you, my friend,” Cal-com said, still on the floor and not moving. “If you can guide me, I will endeavor to learn.”
“Good. Because I do not want to fight the Voku. I want to free them from the Zak’de’ron, and if I’m going to have any chance of doing it, I need you. They need you. This may not be possible, and if it is I doubt the Zak’de’ron will let the Voku go as easily as they did you. I think they would sooner kill them all out of spite than let them leave their service, so this is going to be tricky to say the least, but I think we have time. Time to figure out how to save the Voku before they are ordered to their deaths in a suicide attack against Star Force.”
Cal-com seemed to harden at that prospect, and a moment later he slowly stood up to his full height, looking down at where Paul sat.
“That I cannot allow. I have served the Elders my entire life, but at the same time I have also served my people. The two tasks were one and the same before, but if they must now be split, I still have a responsibility to my race and to those who have directly served under my command. Show me how I can acquit this responsibility, Archon, and I will dedicate my life to serving Star Force.”
“No. No more serving,” Paul said, standing as well as he grabbed Cal-com’s arm, gripping it in a wrist-lock handshake. “We’re friends, and now you’re family. We fight together, side by side, because we choose to. Not because of an oath or servitude. We do it because it’s the right thing to do, and because together we are stronger than we are fighting on our own. That’s called a ‘team’ and it is something Star Force does very well.”
“Then I will join your team,” Cal-com said, grabbing Paul’s wrist and completing the lock with his larger hand. “That you lead.”
“Well, I am an Archon. That literally means ‘leader.’”
“It suits you well. And thank you for the distinction. Serving someone so small would be…odd.”
Paul laughed. “Good. Very good. Now, let’s discuss something you haven’t been exposed to yet. A little thing called Essence that I would very much like to know if any of the Zak’de’ron you have encountered have demonstrated…”
10
November 20, 128440
Solar System (Home One Kingdom)
Earth
Davis tapped on his desk, a frustrated tap that amounted to a small version of punching a wall as he read the latest report from Dina’s research project. She had nothing new to show for it other than a long list of things they’d tried that had no effect whatsoever. The Orb seemed to not exist, yet it was absorbing Essence like a sponge. Only hardened Essence could penetrate it, and even then it took Dina’s level of skill to manage even a short breach. Lesser skilled Archons couldn’t even get through the dense ‘material’ and nobody had any idea what it was, how it worked, or what it could do.
To put it bluntly, they were stumped. Someone out there had Essence technology far beyond what Star Force could understand, and while he wanted answers he knew better than to ask the Knights of Quenar to assist. He doubted they would be able to help, but their level of Essence skill wasn’t fully known. It might be lower than Star Force, or perhaps higher, but Davis had the feeling this was beyond both of them, and that left the question of who the Orb belonged to?
The galaxy was vast, that was a given, but something that literally ate chunks out of planets shouldn’t have been able to hide this well. Was it destroyed? Were they destroyed? Or was it so terrible that it destroyed all its victims before they had a chance to tell others what happened? And why weren’t there more worlds out there showing evidence of being harvested?
There were too many questions and almost no answers. And if Ariel hadn’t stumbled across this Star Force would have continued to be completely blind to this mysterious threat.
Davis’s eyes darted to a small hologram in a niche on the far wall of his massive office. It depicted an Archon, Keli-172, who had died. She was the most senior Archon ever lost, and it hadn’t been in combat. When Star Force’s knowledge of Essence was limited and numerous Archons had broken through the barrier to the point where they could cause an Essence Rush and actually use it to do various
things they, of course, pushed their limits. The trailblazers had been slightly more cautious, and Keli had been the first one to encounter Essence suction.
She’d been working on creating shapes with her Essence, the kind that Davis could now use to lift objects without his Lachka. His own control was wobbly, but he could manage small items that didn’t require a precise grip. Keli had been pushing Essence into larger and larger objects, noting that the larger they became the easier it was to fill them up, for the Essence clung to itself somewhat, and Davis had learned himself that pushing your Essence away from your body required an effort.
That effort diminished with the more of your Essence that existed outside your body yet it was always connected to you by a conduit. Without a conduit you lost control of it and the Essence would return to you if your body crossed it or came close enough, but if not it would gradually disappear while floating around like a cloud.
But if you maintained a link you could control it with your Core and make it do various things. However, as Keli discovered for the rest of Star Force, if you put more Essence in your objects than you have within your body, the Essence in your body wants to flow towards the larger amount and a suction occurs. It had been drained from her without effort, and never having experienced this before she didn’t know how to hold her Essence inside and fight the suction.
Now, Davis knew, if he accidentally crossed into a suction situation he needed to bring the Essence object back to his body and remerge it. If he didn’t, what happened to Keli could happen to him…with the suction pulling so much Essence away from her body that her Core detached from it. Essence was the glue that connected a Core to a body, and if the amount got too low you would simply die.
Keli paid the ultimate price for that lesson, but to this day no other Archon had died to suction because they now had the knowledge of it, the threat it posed, and had come up with ways to counter it. Davis kept her hologram in his office as a reminder of how the unknown can kill even the most prepared and wise among us because it can catch us off guard.
And now Davis feared they were blundering into another such situation. The Orb was so far beyond them he had no idea if it was dangerous or what danger might be in the technology or skills that created it, or from the people that wielded them. This was an entirely blank canvas for Star Force, and Keli was a reminder how dangerous such ignorance could be.
That didn’t sit well with Davis, hence the tapping on the desk as he tried to piece this mystery together going through every experiment that Dina’s team was conducting and hoping to gain some insight from their failures…before someone else paid the price of discovery with their life.
It had taken a year to get here, but the Chixzon ship had finally penetrated the outer defense ring of the Hadarak Zone. They had never been here before due to the danger, but they had gained knowledge of some of the inner workings of the Hadarak race from the one they had captured long, long ago. They’d used that Hadarak to spawn the Uriti, the galaxy now knew, but they did not know the extent of the information they had gained from the process.
The Hadarak used to patrol halfway out to the Rim, but were now compressed into the Deep Core thanks to the V’kit’no’sat, though that empire didn’t understand the power they were up against. No one did, as far as the Chixzon knew, and that knowledge was why they had never tried to conquer the coreward half of the galaxy. They had sought to dominate the Rim where the Hadarak would not go except under extraordinary circumstances, for it was the massive black holes near the center of the galaxy that were most important to them.
Going outward from them were several layers of defense, with the outermost ring being a band of star systems surrounding the Core in a sphere where they permanently inhabited them. There was no way to make a jump past those systems as far as the Hadarak knew, but they were slow and heavy in comparison to the Chixzon starships, and if one was patient and had strong enough gravity drives you could limp through a few small weaknesses in the outer ring if you knew the geography of what was inside.
The Chixzon did not, because no one had gotten that far to map it, so all they had was the distant light of the stars to guestimate on. If this mission did not return successfully within another two and a half years it would be deemed a failure and another sent, but the 6 mile long vessel had made it through, dodging the Hadarak on its approach to the outer ring then launching off into the void between the stars that made up the ring hoping to catch enough gravity enroute to steer their way to land at another star.
The slower one jumped the more ability you had to steer out in interstellar space because you had more time to pull on the distant stars. The Chixzon had managed to curve this way and that, getting more and more of a tug that allowed them to gradually throw the ship towards one of the closely packed stars this deep into the Core. Had they tried this in the Rim they most likely would have been lost forever in space, but there were so many stars here it was viable, though unpredictable, because you didn’t know where you would end up or if you’d run through a nebula or other debris.
This ship and its crew were expendable and they knew it, but their bravery had paid off and they now sat in a very high orbit around a massive single star that they had slingshotted around, unable to directly brake against, but they’d clung to its gravity field long enough to curve them into a full stop well beyond the inner planets…or what was left of them.
The Chixzon had never been able to get this far before, not even on deep range scans. They were in completely unexplored territory aside from what knowledge they’d gotten from the captured Hadarak. But as they began recording passive scans of the system what they saw was mind boggling.
There were four planets in this system, all of which had been rocky, but now they were hollowed out with living tissue replacing the holes in a grotesque weed-like chaotic arrangement that extended far beyond the once natural sphere. Those growths were massive minion colonies, doing what the Chixzon were not entirely sure. Their information was not complete, but they knew these were well protected and critical to the interconnectivity of the Hadarak civilization…which was why the Chixzon ship had to breach the outer ring to get to one.
They were lucky to find a system with one the first time out, though their information suggested most star systems within the outer boundary line had them in a ratio of something like 6/10. And there were so many warship-scale minions floating around the four infested planets and stellar orbit that the Chixzon doubted they would be able to make it in to the star to make a jump out at any decent speed. Unless they limped out, making slow jumps from high orbit like were they currently were, those minions were going to run them down and destroy them…and as soon as the passive sensors caught up on the lag, they would most likely see those minions already coming at them thanks to the gravity sensors the Hadarak operated primarily on.
Their arrival here was no doubt detected, despite the fact they were operating one of the best cloaking devices in the galaxy. But it was no matter. They were here where they needed to be and close to accomplishing their mission. Their surviving it was extraneous, but there was still a chance of failure they had to act quickly to banish.
The Chixzon ship gripped hard on the star’s gravity, launching it towards it on a trajectory away from the planets. If they headed towards them the minions would cluster there even more, but if they pulled them off then cut back it would increase their chances of making it to one of the minion colonies.
The problem was, the warship-class minions were not as slow as the Hadarak, and there were many varieties here never before seen elsewhere in the galaxy. The Chixzon knew they were stronger and specifically held back to allow the Hadarak to analyze threats based on how far they pushed into the Hadarak patrols. If the V’kit’no’sat realized what their continual war into Hadarak territory would ultimately result in…if they were successful…then they would have abandoned the Core like the Chixzon had and left it to the Hadarak. There was no defeating them, and the little tractio
n the V’kit’no’sat had gained was only because the Hadarak allowed it. Push too far and you would awaken a power beyond measure that would snuff you out with little contest.
But the V’kit’no’sat were nowhere near the outer defense ring, let alone getting to these minion colonies. If and when they got to the defense ring a powerful response would surge forth from within, destroying the V’kit’no’sat and pushing the patrols back out to their mid galaxy line…but that wasn’t enough for the Chixzon, nor would it happen fast enough. There was another function the Hadarak had, among many, and if the ‘little beings’ every became strong enough to get to the minion colonies it would trigger a purge of them all from the galaxy…a task that would take a million years to fully realize, but it was deemed absolutely necessary to keep the ‘little beings’ from reaching the inner defense rings.
The Chixzon did not know what they were or what they protected, but they knew if the outer defense ring was broken it would trigger the galactic purge. The V’kit’no’sat were not strong enough to provoke that response, nor were the Chixzon, and even if this ship rammed the colony and did damage to it, that would not be enough to trigger the purge. However, they’d gained knowledge of the signal that would be sent out if such an attack were successful, but it had to go out through the intricate communications network that these minion colonies supported.
The Chixzon ship did not have a powerful transmitter, so it was going to have to get very, very close in order to get the minion colonies to receive and then transmit it back out across the Deep Core as if it had come from one of their own colonies in another system. This was not something the Chixzon wanted to do, for it would destroy the Rim as well over time, but they no longer had any choice. They could survive it in the massive colony ships they had built, hidden within various nebulas that the Hadarak would never take notice of. It would take an extremely long time for the Hadarak to confirm the galaxy was free of little beings, but if their information was right, when that confirmation was finally made, they would retreat back to the Core and resume their normal patrols, leaving the Chixzon to dominate the rubble left behind.
